People are so beautiful it hurts. We all have this beauty in us, this otherworldly potential to be so much more than what we settle for. At times, this awareness is the only thing that makes sense of this senseless existence, its very foundation, the star calling us forward, the purpose of this flesh. Most of the times, though, it makes life ever more painful, because it throws light upon the dark truths we have spent a lifetime learning to ignore.
Someone’s asked in an email from where I get the strength to keep going. The raw answer is: fear. Fear and desperation and the knife-like breath of death I see slowly and implacably eating me from the inside, consuming the beauty within myself, the beauty within you. I look in the mirror and I see a caged animal, waiting in line to be sacrificed. I live with the awareness that none of the breaths I’ve taken, none of the things I’ve felt and done have life within themselves.
The most painful thing I live with, the heaviest weight I carry is the total, perfect knowledge that there is no memory here to preserve even the slightest trace of our sparks of life.
I look in the mirror and I see nothing that will survive death. I stare at this nothingness and life becomes a desperate attempt to outrun death. At times, this turns into pure isolation, and no island can be far enough; no darkness thick enough to cover me. Other times, for very few and rare moments, this turns into white silence. A bright blanket of silence that covers my mind like rarefied air. Up there, in those rarefied clouds, floating high above death, there is Rest, there is Peacefulness.
Father bless,
I recognize well what you say and though young I have faced the reality of death and the living death which is a life ruled by fear. I have walked many dark paths and know the only thing which truly matters is Love, all else is to varying degrees temporary and will pass.
Even in the temporal life all we remember in the end is love, even the worst of the dark memories is eventually eclipsed by love, for the memories of life all fade yet it seems that love remains. Love may be painful and hard at times yet even if we are forgotten the love we have given remains and changes others to love, I may have forgotten most of the people I have ever known yet those who showed me true love still touch my heart and strengthen my journey on-words in my relationship with the one who is Love and never forgets. It is better to live in love and be forgotten by the world yet remembered by the one who is Love, than remembered by the world and forgotten by the one who is Love.
The Lord who is love created only beauty, love and all that is good, the rest is a the result of sin and the falling away of humanity and therefor all of creation from the one who creates and sustains all life, in the end only love will be and all creation will pass away.
I have found that only in love can anything we experience be truly understood, and only in the light of Love can we understand history and out very small place in it. For only through love can we begin to understand how Love became incarnate and how this shows us the way to true being which is in love. For as St Paul says “if I have not love I am a clanging gong or a clanging cymbal. and if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.”
Phoebe
In the hell of the present “passing away” and present “futility” in which “nothing that will survive death” I also experience the “white silence.” A courageous embrace of the “black noise” in which I/we live in hope, is finally, the only salvation and the only way through to salvation. The “white silence” or at least the knowledge of its reality, is the hope I cling to in the midst of this present darkness – the “white silence” are the arms is use to embrace the “black noise.”
It helps me — strengthens me — to hope knowing others hope in this way.